Charles Stross is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland.  He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he helods degrees in Pharmacy and in Computer Science.  

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who use the devices of "space opera" and "hard SF" to innovative new ends; others of this cohort include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Peter Hamilton, Liz Williams, and Richard Morgan. His inspirations and influences include Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Iain M. Banks, among other cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk writers, as well as older figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, and Robert A. Heinlein.

His Tor.com story "Down on the Farm" is is part of the "Laundry" series of novels and stories about Bob Howard, agent of a secret British government agency charged with preventing dark interdimensional entities from destroying the human race. Aside from their obvious debt to Lovecraft, the Laundry stories also pastiche the works of various British thriller writers, including Len Deighton and Ian Fleming.  Other works in the series include the novels The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, the short story "Pimpf," and the Hugo-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle."